Tuesday, October 09, 2012

Grits mentioned the publication of a rare, bipartisan report (pdf) from a US Senate subcommittee which was highly critical of fusion centers (see additional recent coverage here). Texas now has seven, out of 77 nationally. Perhaps predictably, the local recipients of fusion-center grant funds have spoken out to say all the money they received was well spent and they'd like more of it, please, or that's the gist of Patrick George's piece, "Austin police, DPS defend fusion centers after critical Senate report," published last night on the Austin Statesman site, which opened.

Law enforcement officials in Austin are defending the use of “fusion
centers,” some of which across the country were lambasted by a U.S.
Senate subcommittee recently as spending wastefully, being intrusive
into citizens’ private lives and producing information of little value
for counterterrorism.

Austin is home to two such centers, the
Police Department’s Austin Regional Intelligence Center and the
Department of Public Safety’s Texas Fusion Center, both of which opened
in late 2010. Fusion centers are designed to enable law enforcement
agencies to pool and share information with one another.

Responding
to the Senate criticism, DPS Director Steve McCraw said in a statement
that the report is inaccurate because investigators did not get a large
enough sample of how the nation’s 77 fusion centers operate.

“In
fact, they did not visit even one of the seven fusion centers operating
in Texas, including the state level fusion center,” McCraw said.

Assistant
Police Chief David Carter, who oversees the Austin Regional
Intelligence Center, said the Senate report mainly focused on fusion
centers’ work in counter-terrorism. He said the Austin center was set up
from the beginning with an “all crimes” approach and has proved useful
in several investigations.

While it's true no Texas fusion centers were named, a Texas report was chronicled on p. 33 (p. 39 of the pdf) as an exemplar of the type of a non-actionable HIRs [Homeland Information Reports] that fusion centers pass on to DHS which must be canceled by federal reviewers. So it's not
at all accurate to claim the Senate subcommittee didn't closely evaluate the
work of Texas fusion centers. Indeed, they studied Texas' work more than any other. From the subcommittee report:

As
noted, the Subcommittee investigation reviewed every raw DHS
intelligence report drafted on information from state and local fusion
centers from April 1, 2009, to April 30, 2010....

The
Subcommittee investigation counted that, during that period, DHS
intelligence officers at state and local fusion centers around the
country filed 610 draft reports to DHS headquarters for
dissemination. During that period, the draft HIRs came from fusion
centers in just 31 states; fusion centers in 19 states generated no
reports at all. In addition, the vast majority of the 574 unclassified
draft reports filed came from DHS detailees assigned to fusion centers
in just three states – Texas (186 drafts), California (141) and Arizona
(89). Meanwhile, fusion centers in most other states produced little to
no reporting.

Contrary to Col McCraw's complaint, Texas' fusion center reporting was closely examined, making up a disproportionate share (32%, or 186 out of 574 unclassified draft reports) of the sample judged by the subcommittee.And how did we fare?

Of the
574 unclassified draft reports field officers filed, the Subcommittee
investigation counted 188 marked by DHS reviewers as cancelled, nearly a
third. Reviewers recommending cancellation of drafts faulted the
reports for lacking any useful information, for running afoul of
departmental guidelines meant to guard against civil liberties or
Privacy Act protections, or for having no connection to any of DHS’s
many missions, among other reasons.

Of the 386 unclassified
reports published, the Subcommittee investigation counted only 94 which
related in some way to potential terrorist activity, or the activities
of a known or suspected terrorist. Of those 94 reports, most were
published months after they were received; more than a quarter appeared
to duplicate a faster intelligence-sharing process administered by the
FBI; and some were based on information drawn from publicly available
websites or dated public reports. In one case, DHS intelligence
officials appear to have published a report which drew from or repeated
information in a Department of Justice press release published months
earlier. In short, the utility of many of the 94 terrorism-related
reports was questionable.

The Subcommittee investigation found
that fusion center reporting that attempted to share terrorism-related
information was more likely to be cancelled than reporting on other
topics. While the overall cancellation rate of draft intelligence
reports from fusion centers during the period of review was around 30
percent, the cancellation rate for reports which alleged or indicated a
possible connection to terrorism had a higher cancellation rate – over
45 percent.

To review: Texas provided the largest number
of reports of any state in the dataset from which the subcommittee
faulted fusion center reporting for "lacking any useful information,
for running afoul of departmental
guidelines meant to guard against civil liberties or Privacy Act
protections, or for having no connection to any of DHS’s many missions,
among other reasons." The subcommittee may not have named which specific Texas fusion centers
published the most reports that were canceled by DHS reviewers - and granted, the two Austin fusion centers reportedly
came on line after the period they analyzed - but they were definitely looking at Texas fusion centers' work product when they made those assessments, as either Col. McCraw or the reporter should have known from reading the report.

Speaking of which, it should be mentioned that, as if in direct response to Ast. Chief Carter's published remarks, the subcommittee report specifically discussed shortcomings of the "all crimes" approach that Austin PD endorses, lamenting that, “Most [fusion] centers focus on the priority mission of the law enforcement agency that owns/manages them; primarily analytical case support to drug, gang, and violent crime investigations for the geographic area of responsibility,” the report stated. “As a result many centers struggle to build the necessary capabilities required to support federal counterterrorism mission requirements, specifically in the areas of intelligence analysis and information sharing beyond their jurisdictions.” In a subsection titled, "DHS “Success Stories” Do Not Demonstrate Centers’ Value to Counterterrorism Efforts," the report made a point echoed in a recent Grits post:

On its web site, DHS has devoted a page to fusion center “success stories.” On that page, DHS includes many events unrelated to terrorism in a long list of fusion center “successes.” DHS praises, for example, fusion center efforts that have helped to reduce automobile thefts, apprehend a man suspected of kidnapping and rape, and bust up a drug ring

While those anticrime successes are notable, they do not advance the DHS counter terrorism mission; they do not fulfill the promise federal officials made to Congress and the public that the significant taxpayer support directed to fusion centers would aid in the fight against terror; and they do not meet the expectations set by legislative and executive mandates which make clear both branches expected fusion centers to perform as conduits of terrorism information-sharing to and from the federal government.

The feds aren't funding fusion centers just to augment the state's local anti-crime work, in the view of the subcommittee, but based on metrics more at the direct service of federal counter-terrorism efforts. From that perspective, it's easy to see how an "all crimes" or "all hazards" focus of Texas fusion centers doesn't mitigate the Senate subcommittee's negative appraisal, it personifies it. Fusion centers have indulged in massive mission creep, is the federal criticism, and serve little if any anti-terrorism function. DPS and APD would respond, yeah, but we can use that money to go after our own, local bad guys, and when budget times weren't so tight, for years that was enough to justify the grants' rapid expansion. But in budget cutting times, fusion center funding looks like low-hanging fruit that's not fulfilling its mission, from a federal counter terrorism perspective.

Will federal budget cutters succeed in scaling back domestic surveillance, forging new political grounds where civil libertarian critics were too tepid to tread? That's my hope after reviewing the subcommittee report.

Either way, the report effectively rebuts the present claims by Col. McCraw and Ast Chief Carter in the Statesman story: Texas' work was analyzed along with everyone else's and in the end, criticisms in the report can't simply be dodged with claims that "we're different" or they"did not get a large
enough sample." The comment about sample size was either uninformed or disingenuous: If anything, the main problem with the subcommittee's sample was that they looked at Texas fusion centers' work product perhaps a little too closely.

4 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Perhaps an irresponsible federal government is a little scared of of the people that realize they will never pay their debt, Social Security and Medicare are unfunded promises. The federal government is using this war on terror as a big smoke screen to deflect attention. I am far more scared of the federal government and their decisions than I am of any "terrorists". And in fact the whole thing is a big circle jerk, once people wake up to this, the government will have far more former taxpayers gone terrorist than they can handle!

Well I am plenty scared of terrorists, but I have zero faith in fusion centers helping out any. The cries of law enforcement are typical of anyone whose ox is getting gored, and who doesn't want to loser their place at the Federal trough.

I hope the fusion centers will end, but some great political leader once said that the best example of eternal life was a government program.

"District Attorney Request for authorization to enter into a local administrative agreement with The Constituent Agencies of the Texas Anti-Gang Center in connection with establishing the TAG Center facility for use by the agencies in combating the shared threat of criminal organizations operating in and affecting the region.

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